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16Review of: Julian Perlmutter, "Sacred Music, Religious Desire and Knowledge of God: The Music of Human Longing" (review)European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (2). 2022.-
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21Imitation and Contemporaneity: Kierkegaard and the Imitation of ChristHeythrop Journal 63 (4): 553-566. 2022.The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 553-566, July 2022.
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305We Believe: Group Belief and the Liturgical use of CreedsEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (3). 2021.The recitation of creeds in corporate worship is widespread in the Christian tradition. Intuitively, the use of creeds captures the belief not only of the individuals reciting it, but of the Church as a whole. This paper seeks to provide a philosophical analysis of the meaning of the words, ‘We believe…’, in the context of the liturgical recitation of the Creed. Drawing from recent work in group ontology, I explore three recent accounts of group belief and consider the potential of applying thes…Read more
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11Contemporary with Christ: Kierkegaard and Second Personal SpiritualityBaylor University Press. 2020.The Christian life, concerned with both spirituality and doctrine, aims not at rationally defensible truth but at life-transforming love. Greater understanding of the truth will not settle the restlessness in a human spirit; only the redemptive power of relationship with God can calm the soul. The crux of Kierkegaard's presentation of Christianity is not that doctrine is unimportant, but that it is ultimately insufficient for a life lived in relationship with God. In Contemporary with Christ, Jo…Read more
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1320Shattered Faith: The Social Epistemology of Deconversion by Spiritually Violent Religious TraumaIn Michelle Panchuk & Michael C. Rea (eds.), Voices from The Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology, Oxford University Press. 2020.In this chapter, we argue that it’s possible to lose your faith in God by the actions of other people. In particular, we argue that spiritually violent religious trauma, where religious texts are used to shame a person into thinking themselves unworthy of God’s love, can cause a person to stop engaging in activities that sustain their faith in God, such as engaging in the worship of God. To do this, we provide an analysis of faith, worship, and love on which to have faith in God is to have an at…Read more
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70Personal and non-personal worshipEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (1): 1. 2020.Is it possible to worship a non-personal God? According to some, the answer is no: worship necessarily involves addressing the object of one’s worship. Since non-personal gods cannot acknowledge or respond to address, it must be conceptually inappropriate to worship such gods. I object to this argument on two fronts. First, I show that the concept of worship used is too narrow, excluding many cases that obviously count as instances of worship. And, secondly, drawing on recent work on the philoso…Read more
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35Analytic Ecclesiology: The Social Ontology of the ChurchJournal of Analytic Theology 7 (1): 100-123. 2019.In this paper, I aim to show that analytic philosophy can contribute to the theological discussion of ecclesiology. By considering recent analytic work on social ontology, I outline how we might think of the Church as one entity, constituted by many disparate parts. The paper begins with an overview of the theological constraints for the paper, and then proceeds to examine recent work on the philosophy of social ontology and group agency. Drawing on this literature, I outline three models of soc…Read more
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46Praying Together: Corporate Prayer and Shared SituationsZygon 54 (3): 702-730. 2019.In this article, we give much needed attention to the nature and value of corporate prayer by drawing together insights from theology, philosophy, and psychology. First, we explain what it is that distinguishes corporate from private prayer by drawing on the psychological literature on joint attention and the philosophical notion of shared situations. We suggest that what is central to corporate prayer is a “sense of sharedness,” which can be established through a variety of means—through bodily…Read more
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33Common Ritual KnowledgeFaith and Philosophy 36 (1): 33-55. 2019.How can participating in a liturgy allow us to know God? Recent pathbreaking work on the epistemology of liturgy has argued that liturgy allows individuals to gain ritual knowledge of God by coming to know-how to engage God. However, since liturgy (as it is ordinarily practiced) is a group act, I argue that we need to give an account to explain how a group can know God by engaging with liturgy. If group know-how is reducible to instances of individual know-how, then the existing accounts are suf…Read more
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349The Will Not to BelieveSophia 58 (3): 511-523. 2019.Is it permissible to believe that God does not exist if the evidence is inconclusive? In this paper, we give a new argument in support of atheistic belief modelled on William James’s The Will to Believe. According to James, if the evidence for a proposition, p, is ambiguous, and believing that p is a genuine option, then it can be permissible to let your passions decide. Typically, James’s argument has been used as a defence of passionally caused theistic belief. However, in the existing literat…Read more
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20Inclusive Worship and Group Liturgical ActionRes Philosophica 95 (3): 449-476. 2018.In this article, I consider how recent work on the philosophy of group-agency and shared-agency can help us to understand what it is for a church to act in worship. I argue that to assess a model’s suitability for providing such an account, we must consider how well it handles cases of non-paradigm participants, such as those with autism spectrum disorder and young infants. I suggest that whilst a shared-agency model helps to clarify how individuals coordinate actions in cases of reading or sing…Read more
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22Philosophy and liturgy part 1: Liturgy and philosophy of actionPhilosophy Compass 13 (10). 2018.In this article, I summarize recent work on the philosophy of liturgy. In part 2 of this article, I consider how liturgy can provide a way of knowing God personally. I outline accounts of acquiring phenomenal knowledge, practical knowledge, and propositional knowledge by participating in liturgy.
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36Philosophy and liturgy part 2: Liturgy and epistemologyPhilosophy Compass 13 (10). 2018.In this article, I summarize recent work on the philosophy of liturgy. In part 2 of this article, I consider how liturgy can provide a way of knowing God personally. I outline accounts of acquiring phenomenal knowledge, practical knowledge, and propositional knowledge by participating in liturgy.
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18Communal Knowledge and the Beatific VisionTheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 2 (2). 2018.
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61Common WorshipFaith and Philosophy 35 (3): 299-325. 2018.People of faith, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, worship corporately at least as often, if not more so, than they do individually. Why do they do this? There are, of course, many reasons, some having to do with personal preference and others having to do with the theology of worship. But, in this paper, we explore one reason, a philosophical reason, which, despite recent work on the philosophy of liturgy, has gone underappreciated. In particular, we argue that corporate worship en…Read more
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26Common WorshipFaith and Philosophy 35 (3): 299-325. 2018.People of faith, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, worship corporately at least as often, if not more so, than they do individually. Why do they do this? There are, of course, many reasons, some having to do with personal preference and others having to do with the theology of worship. But, in this paper, we explore one reason, a philosophical reason, which, despite recent work on the philosophy of liturgy, has gone underappreciated. In particular, we argue that corporate worship en…Read more
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12Prayer as God-knowledgeKierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2017 (1): 101-114. 2017.Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 1 Seiten: 101-114.
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23Paul K. Moser, The God Relationship. The Ethics for Inquiry about the DivineEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (3): 230-234. 2017.
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24Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual TrialBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (2): 388-390. 2015.
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55Empathy and divine union in Kierkegaard: solving the faith/history problem in Philosophical FragmentsReligious Studies 51 (4): 455-476. 2015.Søren Kierkegaard 's account of faith in Philosophical Fragments claims that the historical Incarnation is necessary for faith, but that historical evidence for the Incarnation is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. It has been argued that the defence of these two claims gives rise to a faith /history problem for Kierkegaard and that it is incoherent to defend an account of faith which affirms both the necessity of the historical Incarnation and rejects the necessity and sufficiency of t…Read more
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24The naked self: Kierkegaard and personal identity (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (2): 422-425. 2017.
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441Experiencing the Real Presence of Christ in the EucharistJournal of Analytic Theology 5 175-196. 2017.We present a new understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist on the model of Stump’s account of God’s omnipresence and Green and Quan’s account of experiencing God in Scripture. On this understanding, Christ is derivatively, rather than fundamentally, located in the consecrated bread and wine, such that Christ is present to the believer through the consecrated bread and wine, thereby making available to the believer a second-person experience of Christ, where the consecrated bread a…Read more
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82Non-evidential believing and permissivism about evidence: a reply to Dan-Johan EklundReligious Studies (1): 1-9. 2015.In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case against Bishop's account of passionally caused beli…Read more
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27Søren Kierkegaard: subjectivity, irony, and the crisis of modernity (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (4): 844-847. 2017.
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28Contemporaneity and communion: Kierkegaard on the personal presence of ChristBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1): 41-62. 2017.Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that having faith requires being contemporary with Christ is one of the most important, yet difficult to interpret claims across his entire authorship. How can one be contemporary with a figure who existed more than two millennia ago? A prominent answer to this question is that contemporaneity with Christ is achieved through a kind of imaginative co-presence made possible by reading Scripture. However, I argue, this ignores what Kierkegaard thinks about Christ as a livi…Read more
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University of St. AndrewsHonorary Lecturer (Part-time)
St Andrews, FIfe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Religion |
Christianity |
Søren Kierkegaard |
Religious Experience |
Christianity, Misc |
Areas of Interest
Faith |
Religious Experience |
Epistemology of Religion |
Revelation |